Pet Media Group Saw a 161% Increase in User Activation and Feature Adoption With Usetiful Onboarding

 

Pet Media Group is the world’s largest operator of online marketplaces within the pet sector. They are based in Stockholm, Sweden, but they operate six major dog or horse marketplaces across Europe, including the UK’s largest pet marketplace (and the world’s second-largest), Pets4Homes. Other notable pet marketplaces they run are Sweden’s Hästnet, the largest equestrian marketplace in Scandinavia, and MundoAnimalia in Spain.

The business was started by two friends, Eyass Shakrah and Axel Lagercrantz. The pair felt that the existing processes of buying and selling pets were overly complex and too open to poor outcomes for breeders, buyers, and, worst of all, the pets themselves. 

Their mission is to use technology to create a better, safer, and more efficient way for people to buy pets, but without compromising on animal welfare. Through smart partnerships and acquisitions, Pet Media Group has created or invested in market-leading brands and helped modernize the European pet market. Each year, the brand helps 1.5 million pets to find new loving homes.

User experience is a big priority for Pet Media Group’s brands. However, there are unique challenges within the pet marketplace sector that require unique user onboarding solutions. 

Here is the story of how Pet Media Group implemented Usetiful to help solve these problems.

The challenge

Pet rehoming can move quickly for both buyers and breeders. Here’s why.

Buyers: In general, buyers research and decide on the various pet breeds early in their process. As a result, they have a plan when they enter the market. Well-prepared buyers might only need about a week to find and reserve a pet.

Breeders: Breeders also need to move quickly because they are working within a limited timeframe based on the pets’ age. There is a sweet spot for rehoming puppies, and understandably, breeders are keen to see their pets go to a good home.

These needs mean that both buyers and breeders have limited time. Any confusion or delays with using the platform can cut into this precious resource and add friction to the rehoming process for both parties.

Pet Media Group wanted to improve its onboarding process so that all users could quickly get comfortable with their platform and understand the different features of their website.

Another area they wanted to improve was adoption. They ran surveys and analyzed web and user data, and came to the realization that many people were visiting their site but not opening accounts or placing an advert to rehome their pets. Again, making the process easier to understand would help these users become active on their platforms.

The solution

The team thought carefully about how to improve platform adoption. After a period of process discovery, they settled on three major requirements for any prospective solution. 

They wanted an interactive product onboarding solution, but it needed to be:

• Quick and easy to use

• Affordable

• A no-code tool that did not require in-house software developers

Here is how Usetiful satisfied these criteria.

Ease of use

Fast and painless implementation was important to Pet Media Group. One of the appeals of Usetiful was that Pet Media Group was able to install the platform within minutes. From there, they were able to use Google Tag Manager for their initial tests.

What’s more, they want to make sure that their solution allows them to build interactive product tours quickly and easily.

Affordable

However, it wasn’t just the basic monthly costs of the service that Pet Media Group had to consider. They also wanted an onboarding solution that would be charged per assist rather than per page load. Their biggest site is Pets4Homes. That property gets tens of thousands of new users each month. A solution that charged per site visit was not sustainable for Pet Media Group and its suite of pet marketplace platforms.

No-code capabilities

Another big consideration for Pet Media Group was that the solution did not require developers. The company manages a lot of different sites, so they know that the software development life cycle is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. 

No-code tools, like Usetiful, have revolutionized the B2B SaaS space in recent years because they allow nontechnical teams to build customized solutions thanks to drag-and-drop interfaces. This process cuts out the back and forth between stakeholders and developers and means that businesses can get tailor-made solutions up and running without huge sums of investment.

When taken together, Pet Media Group was positive that Usetiful would satisfy these criteria. However, they needed to perform some tests to see how our digital adoption platform would impact their brand. 

Let’s look at how things turned out below.

The results

The first big test that Pet Media Group implemented was user onboarding content to:

1. Welcome new users to their platform

2. Direct users who wanted to rehome toward creating a pet advert

They created a two-step Usetiful product tour and applied it across five of their six pet marketplace websites. During the test, the average number of website visitors to their sites stayed at the same level. However, their Useful-powered product tour had a massive impact on their business.

#1 Remarkable growth of advert publishing rate on MundoAnimalia and PuppyPlaats

MundoAnimalia is Pet Media Group’s Spanish pet marketplace website. Their onboarding product tour immediately saw a 161% growth in the number of adverts published week on week. What's more, the effects continued, and they now have a new, higher baseline of adverts being created each week. Meanwhile, PuppyPlaats (Pet Media Group’s Dutch site), saw a 58% rise in advertisements just a week after implementing Usetiful. Again, this trend continued within the following weeks as they expanded the Usetiful Tour from their homepage to other pages as well. 

A 2-step product tour that welcomes new users and directs them to create a pet advert on MundoAnimalia & PuppyPlaats

Both the MundoAnimalia and PuppyPlaats results show how a solid user onboarding tour can help drive revenue by boosting conversion rates. It means that brands can wring the most from their organic traffic. Another interesting wrinkle here is that by increasing conversion rates, businesses can decide to invest more in a paid advertisement, such as PPC, because the cost per ad (CPA) can yield a greater return on ad spending (ROAS).

#2.  Significant time reduction for manual support

Of course, there are other interesting user onboarding use cases for Pet Media Group, too. For example, breeding licenses are mandatory in Spain. Any breeder that joins MundoAnimalia must upload their license so that the Pet Media Group Trust & Safety team can validate the document. 

The Pet Media Group team created a comprehensive multi-step tour with Usetiful to walk breeders through the process. It ensures that breeders of all levels of technical competence know exactly what to do and has led to significant time reduction for manual support, as their Marketplace Manager has noticed a significant increase in the number of breeders uploading their licences without her input.

A snippet of the multi-step tour on MundoAnimalia in guiding breeder to upload their licence.

#3. Increased engagement via A/B testing for a saved search 

Pet Media Group has experimented with Usetiful to increase engagement. When buyers search for pets, they select against specific criteria. Pet Media Group used a multi-step Usetiful flow to encourage pet buyers to save their search and be alerted of new pets that match their filters.

A multi-step Usetiful flow to encourage pet buyers to save their search and be alerted of new pets that match their filters.

Charlotte Nicolaou, Product Marketing Lead at Pet Media Group, is cautiously optimistic about the feature. After running a series of A/B tests, those who were presented with the workflow were creating more saved searches. However, Nicolaou suggests that it’s early days, stating “We need much more data for statistical significance.”

#4. Increased trust by using Banner

The Usetiful Banner feature allows you to create in-app announcements. Pet Media Group experimented with using banners on its new Spanish brand to promote its “Why sell here” page. The theory was that by directing users to a page that explains their values, breeders would be more likely to feel comfortable using the platform.

An A/B testing Banner on mobile and desktop view of Pet Media Group.

Pet Media Group ran A/B testing to see how users who saw the banner reacted. Nicolaou says that it “seems we have an increase in the number of new adverts coming from users who saw the banner and even more for those who clicked it.” However, this implementation is still in its early days and will take more time to truly understand the impact of the banners, even if early results are promising.

What does the future hold for Pet Media Group?

Pet Media Group is known for its innovative approach to technology. As such, their plans to improve their user onboarding experience continue beyond there. They plan to integrate Usetiful with their marketing automation tool to help trigger mandatory tours at the right time to help their users understand how they can get value from their website. 

The company will trigger emails, push notifications, and Usetiful-powered product tours from one master tool. This process will help them create the sort of seamless, personalized, and coherent user onboarding experience that modern consumers demand. 

New feature adoption

Finally, Pet Media Group will also apply Usetiful to help with new feature adoption. They have recently added a Pet Payments service for their Pets4Homes website. The Pet Payments services let buyers safely pay for their pet with protections from Pet Media Group in case the breeder backs out or in case of a scam. 

Pet Media Group would be using A/B testing to help launch this product. They plan to target one-eight of their user base with a Usetiful tag, which triggers a mandatory tour when the user engages with their site. From there, they will use the data to compare the adoption of their Pet Payments feature against users who have not seen any onboarding feature.

Final thoughts

Pet Media Group’s implementation of Usetiful’s user onboarding software has helped them discover something that our customers understand: Using an onboarding solution helps boost product adoption by showing users exactly how they can get value from a website. 

While there are a lot of user onboarding tools out there, Pet Media Group needed a solution that met their particular requirements. The onboarding software needed to be user-friendly, no-code, and cost-effective. Fortunately, these are three of the key value points of Usetiful.

Boosting user activation by 161% is an incredible result that shows how implementing onboarding software like Usetiful can soon pay for itself. 

If you want to see how our user onboarding tools can help your business provide better onboarding experiences that increase product activation and feature adoption, click here to start for free today. Usetiful offers users a range of tools like Product Tours, Onboarding Checklists, In-App Surveys, Banners, and a 24-7 Assistant to help you get immediate value from your product or service.